Liverpool artist and photographer

It’s been a busy week! I have been accepted to joinPyewhackett and Pecke‘s guild of esoteric artists (watch this space for more disturbing work!)

I also had a little flurry of ‘felt-painted’ pet portraits… these are essentially needle felt panels – I slowly layer colour and shade through many hours of ‘stabbing’ with a barbed needle – sometimes only adding one or two strands of coloured wool at a time! I then mount the finished work onto a canvas backing for hanging, the standard size is 8×8 inches, but I can do pretty much any size on commission – they are available here, email me directly at abiboothart@live.com, all I require is a clear, in focus photograph of the pet in question!

Here is the recently completed Stanlee:

And his original photo:

And here is a little montage of the steps involved in creating a pet portrait, this one is Dexter the foal:

Last week’s work in progress was Oster the Cthulhu bust… here he is in all his finished glory:

He’s available for sale on Etsy, here, for a limited time, before he will (unless you snap him up!) move into a brick and mortar shop in Liverpool.

He took me the full week to create – my wonderful partner in crime, as well as marriage, Tony created his wire skeleton from some sketches I made, which I then proceeded to ‘stuff’ and cover with wool in my studio (yeah, the sofa is my studio!)…

The filling and covering stage takes such a long time, it begins to feel like I’ll never see colourful wool again! Once the skeleton is well padded and covered I then have to sculpt the musculature and bone and sinew structure, as well as the eyeballs (thank goodness! Black!)

Then comes the exciting part, the slow process of layering the red ‘flesh’ under-layer, strand by strand, adjusting the shape of Oster’s head as I go. Suddenly he starts to develop a personality, and watch me while I work on him…

After what seems like a millenia, I’m raring to get back to the white again, anything that isn’t blood red please… and I can finally get started on his rotten flesh, which was so much fun to stretch across his bone structure, leaving visible gore beneath! Then towards the end of the week I started on the tentacles – if you thought the rest looked time consuming and tricky, you should try tentacles. I taught my kids some new words whilst making those!

After that I was finally on the home stretch, the end was in sight, I was amazed, as I always am, that Oster had really come to life beneath my hands… a touch of blood here and there, and suddenly there he was, finished.

This September I’m celebrating all things horror – my horror based work is going to be exhibited from October 31 here in Liverpool, and the gallery in question already has some of my photography work for sale on their website here! Halloween is just around the corner, and I have horror sculptures on my board at the moment… so it seemed only proper to give away a needle sculpted eyeball this month:

So to win an extra large version of one of these gorgeously gory globes, hit up my Facebook.

…. And here’s a sneak peek of my current project, soon to be unveiled in his completed state: